63 Responses

I recall there was some debate with the Hollow Men etc over whether Brash's mail was acquired via a leak or a hack. Hager's always said it was a leak. The outcome was broadly the same, but the law treats hacking and leaking differently.

Note Herald site is still giving assorted error messages - The APN-branded one, 503 (internal server error) and just plain not responding to requests. No doubt the Herald IT people are on to it and it will settle down in due course. (It's probably a cluster of web servers of which only one/some are down)

Note Herald site is still giving assorted error messages – The APN-branded one, 503 (internal server error) and just plain not responding to requests. No doubt the Herald IT people are on to it and it will settle down in due course. (It’s probably a cluster of web servers of which only one/some are down)

Cameron Slater is one of the stupid and trusting malicious douchebags I have ever run across. He seems to believe anything that someone tells him if it fits his pre-existing delusions about him at the centre of his paranoid wee universe. Rachinger was quite clearly scamming him by telling him what he wanted to hear. I still have difficulty understanding why in the hell Slater took so damn long and expended so much of someone else’s cash figuring that out.

Those who chased the story were wary as hell,

Indeed, as was everyone at TS especially me when this started popping up on twitter.

But for all the reasons not to believe Ben, he had hard evidence to back him up: Screenshots of messages and emails between him and Slater.

Which was what finally convinced me that it looked like Slater had entered a conspiracy to commission the crime of illegally accessing my servers without permission. It caused me to expend a number of days laboriously scanning local and remote log files to see if anyone had actually managed to break into the backend of our site or my servers .

But what is more concerning is that the police appear to have treated an email asking for information by Rangi Kemara to Nicky Hager as if it was probative evidence. Those requests for confirmation of identity float around between people in the local social media all of the time. We do it specifically to identify people doing identity theft and to find out if proffered information is worth pursuing.

In the 8 years of being the sysop at TS, I can’t think of an instance from people that I have contacted/been contacted where I have ever been refused confirmation or where I have denied confirmation. Not even from people that I actively disagree with or been in conflict with at the time. It is just something to do to deal with phishing of all kinds. That the police apparently don’t understand that social dynamic on the local nets is rather appalling.

The different responses from the police are probably down to having different cops running the investigation. In the Brash leak a reasonable cop thought yep that was probably a leak, in the case of Dirty Politics, the top cop probably hates Hagers' guts and may well have put his career in a cul de sac as a consequence.

Hager has never been attacked on the content or substance of his books.

As part of cloning of one of Hager's laptops, the police took a photo of it to record the information on the screen. This was apparently because the police needed internet access because they didn't have a 3G/4G mobile data connection with them. You'd think that a mobile data connection would be standard issue so that the police don't have to obtain internet access via the systems they're investigating.

I don't fully understand the flow from taking a photo to needing internet access, but if it's true that Police needed to use Nicky Hager's internet connection, from the evidence they were supposedly investigating, to facilitate their own investigation, that's insane.

The judgment revealed the phone conversation had been made by Blomfield's former business colleague to Blomfield, and recorded without his knowledge by self-styled justice campaigner Dermot Nottingham, an "associate" of Slater.

If Nottingham was not the "former business colleague to Blomfield" surely he has broken the law relating to recording conversations that you are not a part of. Paging Mr Edgeler!